Devils so close and yet so far from Kings

NHL Playoffs 2012: New Jersey Devils so close and yet so far from Los Angeles Kings

NEWARK, N.J. — Zach Parise stood here, and Martin Brodeur stood there, and they were tasked, as always, with putting what had happened into words. The New Jersey Devils had played two overtime games in the Stanley Cup final, both won by the steamrolling Los Angeles Kings, and it was strange, in a way. Two games decided by so little, in sudden death, and what has resulted is a deficit that looms like an ocean liner as it comes near the shore.

So on Saturday night Parise, the team’s captain, and Brodeur, the team’s icon, stood there and separately tried to make sense of two 2-1 losses and a 2-0 deficit, and eventually came to only slightly different conclusions.

“If we were a little lucky, we could have been up 2-0,” said Brodeur, who made 31 saves but was beaten twice on his stick side by pucks that whistled just above his right elbow.

“I don’t think anything’s got to change,” said Parise, one of so many Devils who have yet to score in the series. “We lost two overtime games. We didn’t lose 5-0, 5-0. We lost two overtime games that we were capable of winning, and we wound up on the wrong side of them, so …”

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“I made the saves I needed to make to keep the guys in it,” said Brodeur, who will be a free agent this summer but will assuredly stay in New Jersey. “You know, just a matter of bounces here and there that makes a difference when they’re tight games, you know. The puck’s following them, I guess. It’s not just against us; it’s against every single team they’ve played on the road so far.”

“I mean, [favourable bounces] happen,” said Parise, who will be a free agent this summer, and who may very well leave New Jersey. “We got a good break in the first game with [Anton Volchenkov’s] shot bouncing off them, and things like that are going to happen throughout the series. I don’t think it’s a case of us getting bad bounces or bad breaks or anything; we’ve just got to do a little more to create our breaks.”

Was it the fickle luck of hockey, as Brodeur repeatedly implied? Or was it a difference in the ability to generate that chance, whether on the mushy and chipped ice of Game 1 or the comparatively smooth and glassy surface of Game 2, as Parise insisted?

In the end, of course, it was probably both. For the second consecutive game the Kings took a 1-0 lead, this time on a stunning individual effort by defenceman Drew Doughty, whose end-to-end rush prompted rather excited comparisons to Bobby Orr. For the second straight game Brodeur kept the Devils in th game long enough to tie it 1-1 on a puck that had to be deflected — by fourth-liner Ryan Carter this time, in an act of skill, rather than Volchenkov’s lucky Game 1 goal that bounced off Kings defenceman Slava Voynov — to creep past astounding Kings goaltender Jonathan Quick, who made one more save than Brodeur in Game 2, and whose post-season save percentage is now .947.

And for the second consecutive game a skilled scorer slid the dagger between New Jersey’s ribs in overtime. It was Anze Kopitar’s breakaway in Game 1, and Jeff Carter’s great looping circle in Game 2, during which he collected the bounce off his own fractured pass to Dustin Penner and finished by hurling a wrist shot from the slot past a partially screened Brodeur at the 13:42 mark of overtime.

The Devils could have scored the decisive goal half a dozen times, but it never came. A third-period 2-on-1 saw Parise deflect a Travis Zajac pass just wide. Kopitar lunged to get his stick into the shooting path of Ilya Kovalchuk’s last-second shot, which flopped end over end, and the wrong end of the puck hit the wrong part of the crossbar with seven seconds left in the game. When Ryan Carter had scored to tie it, three minutes into the third period, the Prudential Center crowd ignited, and Quick had to do the splits to made a save just seconds later, and the two teams were pushing and shoving, and it felt like if we were going to see a long series, this was where it would start.

But an hour later the eighth-seeded Kings had their fourth 2-0 lead on the road in these playoffs, a 4-0 record in overtime, and their record 10th consecutive road win in a single post-season.

So in the end, it matters less why the Kings are up 2-0 than the fact that they are. The Kings seem completely healthy, while New Jersey’s leading scorer, Kovalchuk, reportedly has a bad back and clearly cannot accelerate. The Kings have not showed nerves, and the Devils, if only in Game 1, have. The Kings have been the better team, if only by enough. At one point Brodeur was asked if it was just luck, and of course he shook his head; when asked if the Kings were the best team New Jersey has faced, he did not even hesitate. “Oh, by far,” he said.

The Kings have been lucky, and they have been good. And now the series lurches to Los Angeles, and the Devils seem more than halfway done. They have not played outside the Eastern time zone since playing in Winnipeg on Jan. 14; of the last six teams to drop the first two games of a Stanley Cup final at home, one of them — the 1990 Boston Bruins, who fell 4-1 to Edmonton — managed to avoid a sweep. The Devils aren’t dead, but sometimes you simply run into an opponent who has just about everything going their way.

“It’s disappointing, because we’re there,” Brodeur said. “It’s just a little disappointment that we can’t come through, and can’t score the big goal, and do the little things that made us be where we’re at … you could be disappointed about some of the performances or breaks that we’re getting, but at the end of the day we’re still alive, we’re still in great shape to go out and try to do something amazing.”